Santosh Mohanty from Tata gave a presentation on SOA, with a bit about the current generation, and how to move on to the next generation. Tata is a pretty major sponsor of the conference: I think that webMethods created a new “diamond” level of sponsorship just for them, which gives them both the opening night reception plus a keynote this morning.
His lessons for achieving next generation SOA:
- Define agility controls.
- Create an agile platform.
- Articulate enterprise value in terms of efficiency, agility and adaptability.
- Create a performance framework in order to create a performance-driven organization. This ties in strongly with webMethods message about “measure first” and the focus on BAM and analytics.
- Create business and IT collaboration. Much easier said than done, and I’m not convinced that business needs to be all that involved in SOA since it’s really not relevant to most business people how the services get delivered, just that they are delivered. Of course, I see BPM and SOA and two distinct technologies; those that see BPM as just an extension of SOA will see business-IT collaboration as a necessity, and I think that Tata may fall into this latter camp.
- Establish the right governance.
Tata was (I believe) one of the first companies to achieve CMM level 5 certification, and it makes sense that Mohanty’s first point is about control. It won’t do much to foster emergent applications, however. I think that all the large systems integrators are in a similar position: although there’s lots of work for them around legacy modernization and creating services, the current generation of BPM tools has to scare them, since it allows organizations to do a lot more of their own codeless development of business processes.